The headpiece Author:James Everett Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INTRODUCTION. Title-pages, dedication, introductions, and prefaces, are so common, that an author would appear like a "speckled bird" among his fellows, if he... more » were to presume to shew his face in print without attending to one or other of the nsual ceremonies. It is presumptive evidence of true politeness, and is equal to a touch of the brim of the hat with the tip of the finger, in approaching the august presence of the public — to a low conge before a superior, or to bending in the presence of royalty. It is the customary, but courtly ceremony between an author and his. reader,—the complacent, but significant nod on first acquaintance. The " Head-Piece," which, by means of that- exquisite mental mechanism, called " The association of ideas," connects itself with phrenology, in which are possibly included—by a dexterous union of physiognomy with the subject, the frontispiece, the mantle-piece, and the tailpiece ; the first of the three latter applying to the face, the second to the forehead, and the A third to a luxuriant pasturage of hair, beautifully plaited and folded, and suspended iu true four-footed style behind, with a gorgeous knot of ribbons, iu order to command respect and distinguish it from the necessary appendages of inferior creatures. Of all the Pieces, however, which attract attention, whether school-pieces, water-pieces, time-pieces, or poetical pieces, there are not any of them to be compared with the Head-Piece; for most of these, not only originate with it, or exist for the sake of it, but it is the most honourable—essential to the very life we possess—and is universally necessary to things animate, from the worm that crawls beneath the foot of pride, up to the goose that carries the highest head in a field of stubble. Every human being is the happy po...« less